Evolvica 0.6.3.2 review

Evolvica is a Java Framework for evolutionary algorithms. It is the successor of eaLib, which has been developed at the Department of Electronic Circuits & Systems of the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany from 2000 to 2002. The development on eaLib has been stopped and focuses now on Evolvica. However, eaLib is still available here.

There were quite some things in eaLib that were too complicated to be used. Therefore efforts have been undertaken to simplify the eaLib structure while preserving its flexibility. In addition the internal structure of genetic operators have changed in a way to support a creation of algorithms via a graphical user interface.

The goal for the future is to provide a complete development environment for evolutionary algorithms, including visual algorithm composer, Java editor, debugger and visual result analysis. This would be quite a lot of work but fortunately there is no need to invent the wheel for the 733rd time. Evolvica is based on the Eclipse Platform and uses the foundations provided by this great toolkit. All the Java features (source code editor, debugger and so on) originate from the Eclipse project.

Please note that the current state of the project is still classified as experimental. The version that you can download does not have production quality, it is a functional prototype that is still in some kind of an alpha-state. Several things are working, several others may not as expected. But you are free to try and find out for yourself and you are invited to share your experiences with others on the Evolvica user forum.